CLOSURE OF THORP AT SELLAFIELD

That this House welcomes the albeit belated decision by the operators, Nuclear Management Partners and the owners, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, to close the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield; believes the disastrous decision of this House in 1978 to sanction the construction and operation of THORP by the then British Nuclear Fuels Ltd has caused hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to be wasted on the plant; recalls THORP has suffered a series of operational accidents including the one in July 2004 which led to its closure in April 2005, when the leak from a pipe carrying spent nuclear fuel dissolver fluid was finally discovered; calls upon British Energy to renegotiate its contracts for reprocessing Advanced Gas Cooled-reactor (AGR) spent fuel at Sellafield and to convert them into spent nuclear fuel storage contracts; and further calls on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to open contract renegotiations with the customers of the foreign spent fuel presently in store at Sellafield for it to be conditioned, packaged and returned as unreprocessed radioactive waste to the respective countries of origin of the fuel.